Filmmaker Todd Solondz is easily overlooked.

It's a bright, blue January day at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and Solondz is in Park City, Utah, for the premiere of his latest film, Storytelling. He walks anonymously through the hallways of a nearby ski lodge. Outside, on the sidewalks of this quaint town, people pay him little notice.

Solondz arrived in Utah the night before. Nobody met him at the airport. There was no driver to bring him to the festival. He was alone, and it's easy to imagine that's often the case.

Hold up a photo of Solondz inside a multiplex theater lobby, and chances are that no one will know who he is. Show his photo outside any art house theater, the cinemas that regularly play his films, and you'll get the same response.

Solondz is no celebrity director, despite the fact that his mousy appearance of clunky glasses and frizzy hair make him instantly recognizable. He's off the beaten path.

The same can be said about his movies.

Across an icy alley, inside a garage converted into a temporary cinema, Storytelling makes its Sundance premiere. Another dark and sly look at the American experience, the film is split into two parts, "Fiction" and "Nonfiction." In "Fiction," a white female college student (Selma Blair) faces humiliation from a black creative writing teacher (Robert Wisdom). In "Nonfiction," a documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) uses a wealthy suburban family and their slackerish, teen-age son (Mark Webber) as the subjects of his latest project. (See the accompanying review, "American Graffiti.")

Join Storytelling with Solondz's previous two films -- Welcome to the Dollhouse, a tale about the cruelties of high school life, and Happiness, a dark suburban comedy set around a phone sex stalker and a child abuser -- and you'll have a pitch black American trilogy.

To some, these films capture the essence of American suburbia. To others, they're dirty and overwrought.

"The questions asked by people who attack my films are all legitimate," Solondz says. " 'Is your film moral, immoral or amoral? Is your film misanthropic or condescending to your characters?' I think they're all legitimate questions. If someone doesn't like something, they can justify their dislike in a very reductive way by using these as epithets of sorts.

"But I feel I can defend my work on these grounds. I think there's a moral gravity and a moral sentiment to what I do. The difficulty is that it's not explicit. It's all fraught with ambiguity, and I don't have signposts telling people how to think and what to feel and what is right and what is wrong. My sympathies are always shifting from character to character."

Grown-up Schoolboy
Inside his room at the Sundance Film Festival, Solondz sits politely on a sofa. He listens to questions, pauses and answers in his squeaky voice.

His appearance wavers between vanguard filmmaker and high school nebbish. A red sweater vest covers a bold checkered shirt. While everyone around him is wearing snow boots, he sports yellow Converse sneakers. A pair of clunky, green glasses balances atop his narrow knob. He's a grown-up schoolboy working alongside cutthroat businessmen in the shark-infested arena of moviemaking.

People either love or hate Solondz and his movies. There's no middle ground. The debate even reaches his appearance, as some critics accuse him of using his nerdy looks as an act.

When it's time for a photograph, Solondz self-consciously removes his bulky glasses. He brushes his fingers through his wispy hair. For the 42-year-old, taking off his glasses is the same as removing his totem. Still, even without his specs, he looks the same.

Don't let Solondz's gawky appearance fool you. His independent films are mature, adult, articulate and smart. They're also those rare works that dramatically impact their audiences.

By tacking issues of race, class and sexuality with brutal honesty, Solondz is celebrated as much as he's attacked. His work has been referred to as a "cinema of cruelty." The New Jersey Film Commission, which has helped facilitate his productions, has publicly criticized his finished work.

Welcome to the Dollhouse, which Solondz wrote, produced and directed, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1996. Happiness won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 1998. Storytelling, which opens Friday in Cincinnati, is as challenging and first-rate as the others.

In a culture of film celebrity, Solondz keeps his life private -- or maybe it's just that nobody cares to know.

Heather Matarazzo stars in Solondz's 1996 film Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Solondz was born in Newark, N.J., and grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, the backdrop for all his films. People search the films trying to find autobiographical ties to the filmmaker.

Talking about his childhood, Solondz dwells on long afternoons playing cards with his relatives. He disowns and refuses to discuss his debut feature film, Fear, Anxiety & Depression. He's reluctant to talk about his job teaching English as a second language to immigrants. The past is painful, he says, and he doesn't want to relive it.

"Why should I reflect on those times that are most painful to me?" he asks. "I don't see any good that comes of it for me personally. I'm very pleased with what I've done since then, and obviously there was a certain triumph and redemption with the success of Welcome to the Dollhouse in terms of a career and forging an identity I could live with and could feel good about myself. But it's all there in my head. I don't need to dredge it all up again with each interview."

Solondz is the consummate filmmaker, someone who writes and directs his own stories. Honestly, it's hard to imagine how anyone else could film a Solondz story. The graphic cruelties and uncomfortable characters would probably overwhelm a lesser director.

His camera work isn't especially flashy. His cutting is matter of fact. The magic in Solondz's movies occurs with the courageous performances he gets from his cast -- a mixture of veteran actors like John Goodman, Julie Hagerty and Dylan Baker and new faces like Mark Webber, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heather Matarazzo and Selma Blair.

Solondz's films are frequently disturbing, but they're also laugh-out-loud funny, which make them all the more disturbing.

Big Red Box
Storytelling arrives with no TV commercials or large newspaper ads. That type of aggressive marketing push belongs to a film like the Mel Gibson war drama We Were Soldiers.

Storytelling will open quietly and might very well disappear in a similar manner. It's the nature of true independent filmmaking -- if you take risks like Solondz, it's inevitable that your films cease to be commercial. Honest comedy is a double-edged sword.

A controversial sex scene in Storytelling pit Solondz against the MPAA ratings board. In order to get an "R" rated film, Solondz covers the scene with a large red box. By tweaking Stanley Kubrick's use of digitized bodies to conceal the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, he's created an unexpected source of comedy in a scene that's brutally dramatic.

The red box turns out to be one of the movie's best jokes.

Asked if adding the box was a compromise, Solondz says, "I want the audience to know what they're not allowed to see."

Solondz leans back and talks freely about the scene. He explains how he shot the scene above the female character's breasts and kept the lighting dark. He didn't want the scene to be erotic, he says, but the ratings board disagreed.

"The ratings board found the scene to be pornographic, which implies that they found it sexually exciting," Solondz says. "I can't argue with them. If someone finds it sexually exciting, there's nothing to argue. You either do or you don't. But that's not what I was driving at. It was a scene about humiliation and degradation.

"If I'm to debunk any sorts of myths or question them, it's essential that the scene not be perceived as a rape. It was a scene that the woman could walk away at any time. She not only did not walk away, but she walked toward the man."

Solondz has experienced similar trouble before. After its Cannes premiere, Happiness was dropped by its distributor, October Films, at the request of its parent company, Universal Pictures. Solondz refused to cut the film in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. Happiness' production company, Good Machine, bought the film back from October Films and released the film independently with moderate success.

Without an "R" version, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores refuse to stock Happiness. Only independent video stores carry the film.

Looking back, Solondz has few regrets. Executives at October Films later apologized and paid Solondz his deferred salary.

"That was good for me," he says.

A few weeks after Sundance, speaking from his New York City apartment, Solondz remains upbeat about Storytelling's ratings controversy. He says that New Line was the only studio willing to fund the movie and that he was committed to an "R" rating.

About the only battle Solondz lost, he says, was that he wanted to use the red box in the film's trailer.

Photo By Steve Ramos

Todd Solondz accompanied his latest film, Storytelling, to the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Storytelling has already been playing in cinemas in major U.S. cities, and business so far is moderate. Still, moderate box office is what Solondz expects from his films.

"A movie like Storytelling is going to be incidentally profitable," he says. "I don't make movies about box office. You have to keep in mind, I'm not complaining. I'm not suffering. Storytelling will play in all 50 states and all over the world.

"I don't want to position myself as a victim of a hostile business. It's a mercenary business, but you have to be fairly naïve to have illusions about it."

In Storytelling, Giamatti's documentary filmmaker has to answer to his editor, who accuses him of acting superior and making fun of his subjects. It's a criticism Solondz has heard repeatedly, and it's no accident that the question makes its way into the movie.

Solondz says his films celebrate and critique suburbia equally. He takes his responsibility as a storyteller seriously.

"I liked Chris Smith's American Movie, but the hip, sophisticated audience in New York I watched it with was laughing at the Milwaukee kids," he says. "There's all kinds of laughter, and you have to question the nature of the laughter."

By the end of our last conversation, Solondz admits that he doesn't like thinking about the past. He doesn't believe in golden ages and never contemplates what his career status might have been if he'd been a filmmaker working in 1960s or '70s Hollywood.

He also doesn't like to look into the future. Basically, he's about the here and now.

He's already working on his next film, and it's fair to say it'll be a tale much like his previous films. He's confident that he'll receive the necessary funding, although he might have to forfeit film for digital video.

Solondz keeps busy writing, and writing is what he loves best about the filmmaking process. Everything else is grueling, he says.

At the end of the day, Storytelling plays in theaters across the country, and those who want to see it will have the opportunity, albeit with the addition of a big red box. Of course, that red box ensures that future audiences will be able to rent a copy at their neighborhood Blockbuster.

In the movie business, artistic compromises at least offer a financial reward.

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